Jason Lakin's blog

Much of the health care debate over the past couple of weeks has been fueled by the possibility that Obama would drop the so-called “public option,” and allow it to be replaced with a co-operative.  Like many aspects of the debate over health reform, the “public option” has been fiercely defended and fiercely criticized, but little understood.  This stems, I believe, from some fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of competition in the health sector.  These misunderstandings are sustained by simplistic arguments about “markets” and “competition” that have been adopt full story »

You wouldn't know it from the swastikas and the shouting, but there really are genuine issues at stake in the American health care debate. Because of all the noise, and because of fundamental misunderstandings on both sides, many of the most important issues have not even been discussed. Over the next few weeks, I will expose some misconceptions on both sides, and try to provide some direction for people who are genuinely interested in debating the merits of reform. I expect both liberals and conservatives to disagree with some of w full story »

We have all heard about how the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is responsible for the surge in sub-prime lending, and therefore, extrapolating a touch, the financial crisis of 2008. The Act, originally passed in 1977, encourages banks to loan to lower-income and riskier borrowers who might not qualify for prime mortgage rates. The logic seems clear enough: if the government forced lenders to under-write loans for non-creditworthy borrowers, then the government mus

Just as the swine flu episode has begun to wind down, Mexican elites have been seized by another contagion: bloodying each other on the front pages of the newspapers. Actually, the target of most of the attacks has been Carlos Salinas, Mexico's president between 1988 and 1994, a man already widely loathed for presumed corruption during his tenure. full story »

Last Friday, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard sponsored a conference to reflect on the fifteen years that have transpired since the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. The conference featured academics from both Mexico and the United States. It attempted to describe and debate the nature of political, social and economic change in Chiapas, as well as other poor states, in Mexico since 1994. full story »

Last week, Mexico's Supreme Court received a preliminary report by a special investigative arm of the tribunal that had been charged with looking into human rights violations in Oaxaca. The special investigation had been requested by the Mexican legislature after the violent conflict between the southern state's governor and civil society in 2006. To recall, in 2006, the state's teachers' union joined forces with a coalition of civil activists under the umbrella of the APPO (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca) to call for the resigna full story »

Mexican daily El Universal reports today on a new set of papers detailing the lack of transparency in Mexican industrial relations. In one study, Luis Emilio Giménez Cacho

Public audits are always a mixed blessing. If a public auditor issues a clean bill of health to a government with a history of opacity, some will inevitably wonder if the government is really compliant, or whether, to the contrary, the auditor is ineffective. If the public auditor is effective and finds a lot of dirt, then a country gets plaudits for having a strong auditor, but gets sla